Sacred Hoops_Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior

by Phil Jackson

  Another way I expand the players’ minds is by giving them books to read on road trips. Titles I’ve handed out include: Fever: Twelve Stories by John Wideman (for Michael Jordan), Ways of the White Folks by Langston Hughes (Scottie Pippen), On the Road by Jack Kerouac (Will Perdue), All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (Steve Kerr), and Beavis & Butt-Head: This Book Sucks by Mike Judge (Stacey King). In some cases, I’ve selected books that explore spiritual issues. B. J. Armstrong has read Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, while John Paxson bravely struggled through Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Horace Grant became an avid reader after devouring Joshua: A Parable for Today by Joseph F. Grizone, and Craig Hodges was inspired by Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Dan Millman’s book about an athlete who turns inward to rediscover his competitive spirit.

  Jerry Krause places a premium on finding players with “good character,” and that usually means they have a strong religious background of some kind. Hodges is a good example. When asked to describe himself in three words or less on a pr department questionnaire, he wrote, “searching for truth.” What I liked about Craig was his selfless approach to the game. A devoted student of Islam, he felt the Bulls were on a sacred mission, and he was willing to do anything to further the quest. During my first year as head coach, he was hobbled by a foot injury and lost his starting job to John Paxson. Someone else in that position might have spent the whole season bellyaching about his predicament. Not Craig. “I could have gone on an ego trip, but I didn’t,” he says, “because I knew we were in the midst of something really great.”

  PUTTING IT TOGETHER

  In 1990 the team finally started to click. At first some of the players were skeptical about the triangle offense. B.J. Armstrong, for one, couldn’t believe that it was the answer to every defense imaginable, as Tex Winter claimed. But when we started winning consistently, the players changed their tune. What they liked most about the system was that it was democratic: it created shots for everyone, not just the superstars. “The system gives us direction, keeps us all on the same page,” B. J. said. “If you’re just running plays for individuals, that separates you from one another. If it’s play X, you know who’s going to shoot all the time, and pretty soon you’re like a dog that’s getting hit—you don’t want to do it because there’s no incentive for you. But in the system anyone can shoot, anyone can score, anyone can make the pass. The system responds to whoever is open.”

  It didn’t always work that way in the beginning, however. Sometimes it looked like the players were on five different pages in five different books. But the players were working in harmony with each other, and that meant a lot. The team started coming together in the second half of the 1989–90 season and had the second best record in the league after the All-Star break. We cruised through the first two rounds of the playoffs, beating the Milwaukee Bucks, 3–1, and the Philadelphia 76ers, 4–1.

  Detroit was another story. We’d only beaten the Pistons once during the regular season that year, but we still had high expectations for the series. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the home court advantage, which turned out to be the difference. Though the triangle offense helped open up shots, most of the players were still intimidated by Detroit’s defense. They got nervous as the pressure mounted, and relied too heavily on Jordan when the 24-second clock was running down. And the Pistons descended upon Jordan in threes, knocking him to the floor several times in the first game.

  In Game 2, Jordan, nursing a sore hip and a bruised wrist, scored only 7 points in the first half. At half time he stormed into the locker room and kicked over a chair, furious at his teammates for not picking up the slack. I followed him into the room and echoed the theme, telling the players I thought they were playing tentative, scared basketball. They weren’t attacking the hoop or taking good shots; they were just throwing the ball up, praying for it to go in. That explosion woke them up. Even though they still lost the game, they played much more courageously in the series from that point on.

  The finale was Game 7 in Detroit. Winning the seventh game of a playoff series on the road is difficult no matter what the circumstances, but we had two additional obstacles. John Paxson was out with a sprained ankle, and Scottie Pippen had a migraine headache. The result was an embarrassing 93–74 loss, our weakest performance all season.

  This was the Bulls’ crisis point. Losing that game in such a humiliating way sealed the team’s bond. After the game, Jerry Krause, who rarely gets emotional in front of the team, burst into the locker room and started venting his frustration. As he left, he slammed the door behind him and vowed this kind of defeat would never happen again.

  Truth be told, Jerry didn’t have to say a word. Everyone in the room knew exactly what needed to be done. They’d gotten so close to victory they could smell it.

  Early the next day, assistant coach Jim Cleamons dropped by our training center in Deerfield to do some paperwork. Over in the corner of the weight room, he could see Horace Grant and Scottie Pippen working out with weights.

  They were already preparing for the next season.

  Eight

  AGGRESSIVENESS WITHOUT ANGER

  Fundamentally, the marksman aims at himself.

  —EUGEN HERRIGEL

  That summer in Montana, I realized that anger was the Bulls’ real enemy, not the Detroit Pistons. Anger was the restless demon that seized the group mind and kept the players from being fully awake. Whenever we went to Detroit, the unity and awareness we’d worked so hard to build collapsed, and the players reverted to their most primitive instincts.

  That response was disappointing, but hardly surprising. It was how they’d originally been trained to play the game. Win or die was the code; rousing the players’ anger and bloodlust was the method. But that kind of approach, though it often gets the players’ juices flowing, interferes with concentration and ultimately backfires.

  It also stinks as a blueprint for competition.

  St. Augustine said, “Anger is a weed; hate is the tree.” Anger only breeds more anger and eventually fuels violence—on the streets or in professional sports.

  A JAB FOR A JAB

  It was no coincidence that the players had a hard time staying focused against Detroit. The Pistons’ primary objective was to throw us off our game by raising the level of violence on the floor. They pounded away at the players ruthlessly, pushing, shoving, sometimes even headbutting, to provoke them into retaliating. As soon as that happened, the battle was over.

  The Bulls had a long, ugly history of battling the Pistons. In 1988 a brawl erupted during a game when Detroit’s Rick Mahorn, a 6'10", 260-pound bruiser, fouled Jordan hard on his way to the hoop. Head coach Doug Collins, who weighed in at 195 pounds, tried to quell the disturbance by jumping on Mahorn’s back and attempting to wrestle him to the floor. But Mahorn spun around and sent Collins crashing into the scorers’ table. During another game in 1989, Isiah Thomas slugged Bill Cartwright in the head after running into one of Bill’s elbows. Cartwright, who had never been punched before in a game, hit back, and both players were fined and suspended. Isiah fractured his left hand and missed a good part of the season.

  Scottie Pippen had the most punishing assignment of all. On defense, he had to cover Hatchet Man No. 1, Bill Laimbeer, and on offense, he matched up against Hatchet Man No. 2, Dennis Rodman. Pippen got into some royal battles with Laimbeer, who was four inches taller and outweighed him by at least forty-five pounds. In the 1989 playoffs, Laimbeer elbowed Scottie in the head and gave him a concussion during a tussle over a rebound. The following year, in Game 5 of the playoffs, Scottie took Laimbeer down with a necktie tackle as he was driving to the basket. Afterwards, according to Jordan, Laimbeer threatened to break Michael’s neck in retaliation.

  I wasn’t happy with what Scottie had done. It was foolhardy and dangerous. But I understood only too well the line between playing hard and playing angry. When I played for the Knicks, I had a reputation for being a tough defender and opponents consistent
ly read malevolence into the aggressive way I used my elbows. It was during the 1971–72 playoffs that I learned once and for all that mean-spirited aggression is never worth the price.

  The man who taught me that lesson was Jack Marin, a tough, no-nonsense forward for the Baltimore Bullets who liked to bait Bill Bradley, calling him a “pinko liberal” to rattle him. Marin was an emotional time bomb, and I knew if I could get him angry enough, he would do something stupid. So before a key game I devised a scheme to provoke him that I feel embarrassed about to this day. Late in the fourth quarter, I gave him a little shove as he dribbled toward the basket. Then I confronted him at midcourt and shoved him again. That did it. He whipped around and threw a punch. The next thing he knew, he was ejected—it was his sixth foul—and we went on to win the game.

  Marin held on to his anger until the next time we faced each other, almost a year later. All of a sudden, as I was going for the hoop, he took a shot at me and I went crashing to the floor. It was a painful lesson, but what Marin showed me was that using anger to defeat an opponent inevitably comes back to haunt you.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF NBA WARFARE

  In those days, brawling was a common occurrence in the NBA. Most teams had an enforcer—the Celtics’ “Jungle Jim” Loscutoff was the prototype—whose primary job was to protect his teammates when the going got rough. The Knicks’ enforcer during my first two years was Walt Bellamy, a 6'10½" 245-pound center, but he was missing in action when I had my baptism by fire. The game was against the Hawks, who had just moved to Atlanta from St. Louis and were playing temporarily in a stadium at Georgia Tech, where there was no soundproofing in the locker rooms. Before the game we could hear the Hawks’ coach, Richie Guerin, inciting his players to wage war against us. Guerin wasn’t my biggest fan. The year before I had cut open forward Bill Bridges’ forehead with my elbow, and Guerin was so enraged he ordered another player, Paul Silas, to pay me back. Silas didn’t get around to it in that game, but he hadn’t forgotten Guerin’s charge.

  With about thirty seconds left in the first half, I got the ball near the basket and started making a move on Silas when he shoved me in the back and sent me sprawling across the floor. As I got up and handed the ball to the ref, Silas took a wayward swing at my head. I dodged the blow and walked to the free-throw line, trying, as best I could, to stay calm.

  At halftime the tirade in the other locker room continued, and tensions escalated. Finally, late in the game, a brawl erupted when one of the Atlanta players threw a punch at Willis Reed. Ironically, the only player on either team who didn’t participate in the fight was Bellamy, who had withdrawn psychically from the team because of a dispute with management.

  Soon after that game, the NBA started taking steps to reduce violence on court. First, players were fined, and, in some cases, suspended, for coming off the bench and joining in a brawl. Next, the league clamped down on throwing punches: anyone who struck another player was immediately ejected and suspended for at least one game. Those changes didn’t eliminate violence; they merely gave it a different face. Hall of Fame enforcer Wes Unseld argued that the no-punching rule gave the bullies in the league license to hammer away at players and get away with all kinds of treachery without having to worry about retribution. In the late 1980s, the era of the Detroit Bad Boys, the NBA instituted a new rule severely penalizing players for committing “flagrant” fouls, malicious acts away from the ball that could cause serious injury. That helped, but some teams, in particular, the New York Knicks, still found ways to intimidate their opponents with brute force. So the league changed the rules again in 1994–95, restricting hand-checking and double-teaming in certain situations.

  But the problem of uncontrolled anger and brutality rages on. Writer Kevin Simpson offered this analysis in The Sporting News. “It’s not so much that violence in the NBA has flown out of control, but that deliberate violence has become the next step in a progression of sports culture. While the league has reveled in the raw, physical prowess of its athletes and promoted the game accordingly, it has also presided—unwittingly—over a kind of spiritual deterioration, one that has seen an attitude of intimidation become the preeminent force on the floor.”

  FURTHER ALONG THE PATH OF THE WARRIOR

  There has to be another way, an approach that honors the humanity of both sides while recognizing that only one victor can emerge. A blueprint for giving your all out of respect for the battle, never hatred of the enemy. And, most of all, a wide-angle view of competition that encompasses both opponents as partners in the dance.

  Black Elk spoke of directing love and generosity of spirit toward the white man, even as his people’s land was being taken away. And in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa wrote, “The challenge of warriorship is to step out of the cocoon, to step out into space, by being brave and at the same time gentle.”

  This is the attitude I try to encourage. It’s a direct extension of the Lakota ideal of teamwork we started experimenting with during my years as an assistant coach. In the beginning, though the players were interested, it wasn’t easy to turn their minds around. They’d been conditioned since early adolescence to think that every confrontation was a personal test of manhood. Their first instinct was to use force to solve every problem. What I tried to do was get them to walk away from confrontations and not let themselves be distracted. If somebody fouled them hard, I suggested turning around, taking a deep breath, and staying as composed as possible so they could keep their minds fixed on the goal: victory.

  The system reinforces this perspective. The strength of the triangle offense is that it’s based on the Taoist principle of yielding to an opponent’s force in order to render him powerless. The idea is not to wilt or act dishonorably in the face of overwhelming force, but to be savvy enough to use the enemy’s own power against him. If you look hard enough, you’ll find his weaknesses. Bottom line: there’s no need to overpower when you can outsmart.

  For the strategy to work, all five players have to be moving in sync so that they can take advantage of the openings that occur when the defense overextends itself. If one player gets caught in a tussle with his man, resisting the pressure rather than moving away from it, he can jam up the whole system. That lesson has to be constantly reinforced. Once in a game against the Miami Heat in 1991, I called a timeout when I saw Scottie Pippen get into a trash-talking war with the other side. Scottie knew what I was going to say, and got defensive as soon as I started talking. But Cliff Levingston, a cheerful, fun-loving forward whose nickname was Good News, defused the tension, saying, “Come on, Pip. You know Phil’s right.” Afterwards, we talked about the incident, as an example of how we had to grow as a team and not retaliate every time our opponents did something we didn’t like.

  Teaching the players to embrace a nonbelligerent way of thinking about competition required continuous reinforcement. One of the first steps I took was to institute a series of “silly” fines to discourage players from insulting the other team. Example: a big man will get fined $10 for taking three-point shots at the end of the game when we’re ahead by 20 or more points. That kind of shot demeans your opponent and only builds rage that might be returned later on.

  I also discourage players from turning a good move into a humiliating one. Example: in the 1994 playoffs against the Knicks, Scottie Pippen drove to the basket and sent Patrick Ewing sprawling to the floor. After dunking the ball, Scottie straddled Ewing and waved his finger in Ewing’s face. What did that accomplish? Pippen got a little ego rush, but he also got called for a technical and planted a seed of anger in the Knicks’, not to mention the refs’, minds.

  Sometimes I use our opponents’ anger to try to motivate the team. There’s a clip from a Bulls-Knicks game I often screen that shows Ewing pounding his chest and yelling, “Fuck those motherfuckers!” That feeling is what the players have to steel themselves against. They have to develop a certain grittiness and dogged determination to stand up to
brutality without being lured into the fray.

  EXTENDING THE METAPHOR

  The implications of using the warrior ideal as a way of redirecting aggressive energy reach far beyond the NBA. The need is painfully obvious. A couple of years ago I watched a New York City high school championship game in Madison Square Garden that made my heart sink. It was a messy game, marred by a lot of in-your-face posturing and dirty tactics. When it was over, the winning team approached the losers and started taunting them until a fight broke out. That kind of confrontation, which often leads to tragic consequences, wouldn’t be so prevalent if young people knew how to preserve their pride and dignity without blindly acting out their anger.

  There are those who’ve already picked up the ball. Ellen Riley, one of the few women who attended the Beyond Basketball workshop at the Omega Institute, is using the warrior model in an educational training program for at-risk teenagers in Yonkers, New York. Although it’s not a sports program, the students have embraced the warrior imagery and the ideals of dedication and commitment. “What we’re trying to convey is that individual performance is important, but it has to be embedded in a much larger context,” Riley explains. “Being a responsible member of a community, or team, is simply the most effective way to live.”